Join myself and others in Exeter, alongside artist Steve McCracken, for a curated trail of art and science. Get real time insights into pollution while spotting new artworks of birds. @ecehh.org www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/walking-to...

Open postdoc position in in my lab in Berlin @mpiib-berlin.mpg.de. Join us to push the frontier in ancient microbial genomics. Please apply until Oct 17th. Reach out in case you have any questions. www.mpiib-berlin.mpg.de/2193291/job_...

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... #microsky #microbiome

more exciting work showing the effects that non-antibiotic pharmaceuticals can have on microbial communities 🦠🧫💊

Finding microbes in cancer sequencing data has been controversial. Are we seeing real biology… or just contamination + batch effects?

🤩🎢 #MVIF Season 5 is just about to start! Ten #microbiome events, free to attend, great to present your latest results. #ECR, #preprints, unpublished work are welcome! 👉 www.microbiome-vif.org All talks get a DOI, and those associated with preprints are added to their #bioRxiv #medRxiv pages too.

PhD opportunity, please share: We are looking for a prospective PhD student to start in October 2026 who is excited about bacteria (Klebsiella pneumoniae), how they interact, and how they exchange DNA. All details can be found on the funder website 👉 gw4biomed.ac.uk/developing-c...

New preprint reveals bacteria can't just collect all resistance genes like Pokemon cards. We found mutually exclusive evolutionary pathways to multidrug resistance in E. coli & P. aeruginosa - some resistance mechanisms actively prevent others from coexisting www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

💊 Non-antibiotic drugs & resistance A new study shows common medicines like ibuprofen and acetaminophen can boost E. coli resistance to antibiotics, raising concerns for aged care settings. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s44... #SciComm 🧪 #AMR

I'm super bummed to be missing #ESEB2025 @eseb2025.bsky.social due to a cancelled flight! Here's a quick overview of my talk "Gene- and genome-focused perspectives on microbial pangenomes" slated to be part of The Evolution of Microbial Pangenomes -- which I recommend you attend tomorrow (Fri) ! 1/n

If you ever find yourself needing evidence for ‘Plasmids are just as common in microbes without resistance genes,’ we’ve got you covered! Check our new paper, out today: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

Really pleased to see this study led by @raymondkiu.bsky.social now published in @natcomms.nature.com! We show that probiotics help modulate the preterm infant 👶#microbiome - to reduce ARGs, lower MDR bacteria 🦠 & increase beneficial Bifido ✨ Huge team effort! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I often say that reporting on sex testing in sports is like reporting on a really twisted, 100 year game of wack-a-mole where we see the same things happen over and over. This is a great example. (A short thread, if you'll indulge me.)

Check out this incredible analysis! Prehistoric Global Migration of Vanishing Gut Microbes With Humans www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A science education is not education without also learning how to be a scientist in and FOR the world we live in. For this, we need humanities.

love love love going back to code, re-running and somehow you’ve done something somewhere and it brings you straight back to the problem you thought you solved months back. asking for a friend - anyone done phylogenetic trees with added facets but the facets have individual x axes??

helpful this morning when trying to plan some big things

Phage resistance research position with a fantastic supervisor 👇

coolest email i got all day was about this, what a great and amazing way to raise money for charity! everyone go and enter for the chance to name a phage!!

"If you have a journal article and a journal article shaped tube, you’re set. But what if all the tubes are book and journal shaped and your block is a zine? What are your options?"

‘We have committed ourselves to this toxicity’ Article about some of our work on microplastic, including the toxicity debt hypothesis By @katarinazimmer.bsky.social cen.acs.org/environment/...

Libraries are such an essential, important community service. I've popped in to one to work while my kids are in a near by holiday club. There are people using the computers, getting books, getting advice from community workers, and now a Baby Bounce and Rhyme group. Support your library!

it feels somehow deceitful and deeply disturbing that one of the last acts given in service to another person are now removed of all human touch

It’s really important for EDI that ECRs and PIs can have open, empathetic discussions about feedback and behaviour, without intimidation. Respect from lab members comes from being able to challenge negative behaviour, and being listened to without discussions becoming a competition.

I see this every time I work with community groups. Women stepping in to fill gaps left by LAs and government, only to find the more they step in, the more gaps appear, as government sees this free labour as a solution that their funding crises. It is not. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

"Non-White scientists appear on fewer editorial boards, spend more time under review, and receive fewer citations" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

There's this trope that you have to be so into your PhD topic that you live and breathe it and can't possibly stop thinking about it, so here's your regular reminder that passion is good, but burnout isn't. It's okay and recommended to take breaks, enjoy the weekend, and treat a PhD like a job.

A new version of gcplyr (1.12.0) has just been released and is available now from CRAN and github. This update fixes a handful of bugs along with some improvements to the documentation mikeblazanin.github.io/gcplyr/

really interesting (and useful!) use of ai to assist the identification of bacterial pathogens

Someone on here compared AI produced material as "digital asbestos " which in a few decades' time we will have to work out how to eradicate from the fabric of research.

‘short paper with sense of foreboding’ really hits hard

Finally out! A small screen helps understand a little more about how E. coli regulates major transporters, and reveals how caffeine induces phenotypical antibiotic resistance. Huge thanks to collab @andrenmateus.bsky.social (Umeå) and Christian L. Müller (Munich)! journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

#MicroSky job alert: Senior Research Technician in the Mausz Lab at Warwick, on responses of marine microbes to nutrient limitation & environmental changes. warwick-careers.tal.net/vx/appcentre...

👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

🖥🧬 Some really useful tips, mainly regarding managing dependencies and reproducibility in #R from @weare.rladies.org

alllso pretty cool (all the cool microbiome stuff rn!)

went along to this at lunchtime today (also had the immense pleasure of being a contributor to their research conversations). what a great opportunity for two researchers from different disciplines to collaborate on a project, and the end goal *be* the conversation

A comment I wrote for you is now online at @natcomms.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Oh, oh, it says "time travel will likely remain forever off the table in our universe" with a citation, so read it maybe? (am I doing the click-bait thing right? 🥲).

Interesting paper from the Goodman Lab: Identification of medication–microbiome interactions that affect gut infection www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Striking. After Texas banned abortion, ER visits for early miscarriage rose 25% and blood transfusions surged 54%. Doctors delayed care like D&Cs out of fear of prosecution. More women nearly bled to death. buff.ly/egXhmm7 #medsky #ObGynsky 🛟🧪

more and more evidence that non-antibiotics are likely causing widespread affects in microbiomes (!!) - super super cool work

well this is kinda cool 🦠✨

Out in @natbiotech.nature.com: Metagenome taxonomy profilers usually ignore unknown species. SingleM is an accurate profiler which doesn't, even detecting phyla with no MAGs. Profiles of 700,000 metagenomes at sandpiper.qut.edu.au. A 🧵

Recruitment is still open! Help us by participating in a survey about attraction and intimate relationships. All are welcome, but we’re especially low on heterosexual responses. Please share widely! psicologiagenerale.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

🚨 SWIMMERS & NON-SWIMMERS WANTED! Take part in a survey about the health risks of freshwater bathing and help inform public health research🏊‍♀️ Take part: bit.ly/freshwater-s... More info: www.ecehh.org/news/health-... @exeter.ac.uk @uniofexeternews.bsky.social @oxonandrew.bsky.social

no mow may on our campus really let the flowers spring up. it’s so nice to see them left out behind - so pretty! and great for the insects @uniofexeteresi.bsky.social

Things are about to get a bit ancient. I baked these biscuity sherds on a hemisphere cake tin in an attempt to recreate Ancient Greek pottery fragments in all three dimensions. The originals, dating from c.1600-435 BCE, can be found in the collections of the Ashmolean Museum.

rayyanR v0.2 is out - now able to read in the full text stage of a Rayyan review, rounding off the work we did at @eshackathon.bsky.social’s ESHLondon hackathon a couple of weeks back github.com/befriendabac... #medlibs #evsynth #evidencesynthesis #systematicreview @ecehh.org

Excited to announce our paper on ancient Borrelia genomes is finally out! 🦠💀We document the evolutionary history of louse-borne relapsing fever, published today in @science.org‬ with @lucyvandorp.bsky.social and @pontus-skoglund.bsky.social #aDNA 🏺🧪🧬 Main findings and paper below: 🧵⬇️